Net Neutrality: Comcast Blocking Netflix

Make the costs public, and the profits private.

They want it both ways, and the GOP is happy to give it to them, with their base’s brain dead hard on for deregulation.

They’ve done it out West. Though as mentioned above, the lawsuits have already begun in other areas. Doubt this law will go without one for long.

Supremes let lower court ruling affirming Obama-era FCC Net Neutrality rules:

Of course, those shilling for the big ISPs will say “oh, but it’s not net neutrality causing this, it’s …” – fill in the blank with any number of other things that will make them more money.

Satellite is not a solution. Too much latency.

5G wireless has the potential to offer some competition to cable operators. Verizon I think is firing up a 5G in-home program this year in limited areas.

They’re keeping it slow and mega-expensive and limited because they can squeeze out more money by providing less service- they got no reason to rush it out.

Potential, but it’s a ways out yet. Marketplace did a quick interview on this a bit ago.

Doesn’t help that there’s no consensus on what “5G” means. AT&T apparently just relabeled their 4G LTE service to “5G E” (the E is for Evolution, as in evolving toward 5G). People are going to be understandably confused about what 5G actually is with that sort of thing going on.

Low-earth orbit satellites (like SpaceX is planning) can have less latency than terrestrial internet. They will only be a couple of hundred miles away, and can (potentially) mesh network among themselves more efficiently than trunk-and-switch networks on the ground.

Carriers did the exact same thing with 4G. Just slapped the 4G label on whatever new tech they had and dared the standards committee to call them out on it.

It’ll also take a while before all of 5G’s benefits can be realized simultaneously. 5G offers faster speeds, lower latency, and higher capacity, but each of those benefits requires different kinds of antennas and infrastructure. Each carrier will inevitably optimize for specific situations to start with before it fully matures.

My understanding is that the antennas can only be about 1/10 as far apart as 4G antennas. That’s going to make usage outside of dense, urban areas a significant challenge.

It depends on which specific benefit the carrier is trying to achieve at any given time.

Lower latency and faster speeds will require shorter-range antennas. But 5G will enable carriers to achieve more density at similar antenna range if they’re not trying to get faster speeds or lower latency.

Ultimately what will end up happening longer term is the development of much more complex infrastructure which enables transitioning from longer-range antennas to shorter-range / indoor antennas, and devices which know how to navigate across that infrastructure. But 5G is unfortunately not a one-size-fits-all “feature”, it’s just a standard which encompasses countless different variations and goals.

Trumpists: pushing for internet fast lanes to own the libs.

Folks who oppose net neutrality generally have zero actual arguments for why they believe what they do. Like, they literally don’t know why they think net neutrality is bad, beyond some vague belief that Obama did it.

Eh, Ajit Pai does. It doesn’t maximise ISP profitability, therefore it is bad.

I’ve seen some (poor) arguments about not seeing a good enough reason for the government to interfere with the holy exercise of rapacious rent-seeking hypercapitalism private enterprise.

Yeah, I think that’s the crux of the anti-net neutrality argument. Get your government hands off my internet, even though I know that means it will get more expensive and cumbersome for me.

I mean, the majority of it is still having third-world data infrastructure to own the libs. But the free-market maximalist view is the fig leaf I’ve seen most often.